Intro: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Literature
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This document provides an overview of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern literature. It discusses the origins and early forms of writing including pictographs in Mesopotamia around 3300-2900 BCE and the later development of cuneiform script in Sumeria around 2100 BCE. It also describes some of the key literary works including The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest works recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets. Finally, it outlines some of the major influences on ancient Greek and Roman literature such as Phoenician culture, the Persian Empire, and the expansion of the Roman Republic into an empire.
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Intro: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Literature
- 1. Intro: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Literature (Volume A)
- 2. • original purposes for writing • Mesopotamia, 3300–2900 B.C.E. • pictographs • wedge marks, 2800 B.C.E. Invention of Writing
- 3. Writing Forms • hieroglyphs, “sacred carvings” • Egypt, Sumer, and scribal culture • Phoenician alphabet
- 4. Cuneiform • wedge-shaped script • 2100 B.C.E. • clay tablets • Sumerians
- 5. Background • slavery • Nile, Euphrates, Tigris valleys • polytheism • orthopraxy, orthodoxy
- 6. The Greeks • Minoa, Crete • Linear B • fire and oral traditions • Phoenician influence • city-state structure and influence on writing
- 8. Sparta and Athens • Sparta, oligarchy • Attica, democracy • rights for slaves and women • political approach • Spartan defeat of Athens, 404 B.C.E.
- 9. Herodotus • nomos • historia • abduction of women • Persian culture
- 10. Greek Education and Culture • children’s education • slave tutors • Sophists • Socrates
- 11. Macedonian Rule • Greek city-states • King Philip, Macedon • Alexander, imperialism • Ptolemy, Egypt • Hellenism • koine
- 12. Rome
- 13. • tradition (mos maiorum) • seriousness (gravitas) • courage (virtus) • industry (diligentia) • duty (pietas) • Catullus, Virgil, Ovid • origins and themes of Latin literature • Julius and Octavian, empire and Republic Roman Values
- 14. The Ancient Middle East
- 16. Greece during the Peloponnesian War
- 17. Roman Expansion
- 18. The earliest literature took the form of: _________ . a. oral stories and songs b. poems collected in anthologies c. stories in holy books d. epics inscribed on stone tablets Test Your Knowledge
- 19. The earliest written documents (dating from about 3300–2990 B.C.E.) were: ___________ . a. epic poetry b. political and legal records c. religious texts d. historical fiction Test Your Knowledge
- 20. One of the earliest literary texts was the Sumerian poem called The Epic of Gilgamesh (NAWOL, Volume A). What writing system was used to first record this epic poem? a. Phoenician b. Latin c. cuneiform d. hieroglyphics Test Your Knowledge
- 21. Most ancient cultures were: ___________. a. monotheistic b. atheistic c. polytheistic d. dualistic Test Your Knowledge
- 22. During the Dark Ages of Greece, Greeks lost which of the following? a. wealth b. writing c. industry d. all of the above Test Your Knowledge
- 23. As Greece emerged from its Dark Ages, what empire ruled most of Asia Minor? a. Roman b. Persian c. Egyptian d. Indo-European Test Your Knowledge
- 24. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology Of World Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for The Norton Anthology Of World Literature
Notes de l'éditeur
- Writing was not originally invented to preserve literature. The earliest written documents were commercial, administrative, political, and legal, and were created in Mesopotamia around 3300-2990 B.C.E. The characters, which were pictographic (they looked like the things they represented) were inscribed on tablets of wet clay with a pointed stick and baked in the sun. By 2800 B.C.E., scribes began to use the wedge-shaped end of the stick to make marks rather than the pointed end to draw pictures. The resulting script is known as cuneiform and was additionally used to preserve historical events and literature. The image is from an administrative tablet from Mesopotamia, 3100–2900 B.C.E.
- Egyptian hieroglyphs both emerged in the latter half of the fourth millennium B.C.E. Sumer and Egypt were “scribal cultures,” meaning that writing was an occupation for paid professionals, not something everyone was expected to do. Literacy was not universal, and silent reading was almost unknown in the ancient world. Hieroglyph is a Greek word for “sacred carving,” and hieroglyphs include both pictographs and signs that stand for sounds. The Phoenicians, a Semitic trading people, designed a script that consisted of 22 consonantal sounds with no vowels. The form was adopted by the Hebrews and others but is difficult to pronounce due to the missing vowels. Greek and Roman were adapted from this language as well. The left image represents a black granite sculpture depcicting an Egyptian scribe (14th-century B.C.E.). The right image caption reads “Account of silver for the governor written in Sumerian cuneiform on a clay tablet.” From Shuruppak or Abu Salabikh, Iraq, 2500 B.C.E.), in the Museum of London.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets, in cuneiform script, around 2100 B.C.E. In the Mediterranean and Near East, the earliest people to develop systems of writing were the ancient Sumerians and the Egyptians. Sumerian cuneiform—wedge-shaped markings inscribed on clay tablets—and Egyptian hieroglyphs both emerged in the latter half of the fourth millennium B.C.E. Sumer and Egypt were “scribal cultures,” meaning that writing was an occupation for paid professionals, not something everyone was expected to do. Literacy was not universal, and silent reading was almost unknown in the ancient world. The image caption reads “Account of silver for the governor written in Sumerian cuneiform on a clay tablet.” From Shuruppak or Abu Salabikh, Iraq, 2500 B.C.E.), in the Museum of London.
- Advanced civilizations of the ancient world depended on slaves, who worked the land, took care of animals and children, dug mines, built cities, manufactured goods, and provided entertainment. Because ancient societies depended on the proximity of natural resources, especially well-irrigated, fertile soil, the first civilizations of the Mediterranean basin developed in two regions—the Nile valley and the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Most ancient cultures were polytheistic; the cult of Aten and the Hebrew god are two examples of monotheistic worship. Most cultures relied heavily on rituals, community festivals, and songs and prized orthopraxy (practice) over orthodoxy (belief), The image is part of a Relief showing a Procession of Gods with Inscription (2145-2025 BCE). The caption states that the jackal-headed god, Wepwawet, and the earth-deity, Geb, are represented along with scepters and ankhs. Each deity is identified by the hieroglyphs near his figure, and the body shape are elements of 11th Dynasty style. Walters Art Museum.
- Minoan culture thrived in the second millennium B.C.E. on the island of Crete, and was centered around enormous palace structures; mainland Greece was a comparably rich culture and possessed a writing system now known as Linear B. Fire destroyed many of these places, and the writing system and wealth was lost. Greeks developed oral traditions of poetry during this period, which ended in the eighth century B.C.E., when Greece literacy reemerged with a Phoenician-influenced alphabet. Greece was divided into city-states that were independent political and economic entities and could maintain independence largely as a result of the geographical barriers and scattered islands. The image is an example of Linear B script from a tablet of Pylos. The caption states that the piece contains information on the distribution of bovine, pig, and deer hides to shoe and saddlemakers. Attribution: Sharon Mollerus.
- In the sixth century B.C.E., the Persians dominated the Near East and Mediterranean areas. The Greeks—led by Athens and Sparta—managed to repel repeated Persian invasions in the years 490–479 B.C.E., winning decisive naval battles at Marathon and Salamis. The Athenians produced their most important literary achievements during this period. The image shows a Greek hoplite and Persian warrior fighting (5th-century B.C.E). National Archaeological Museum of Athens, Greece.
- Sparta was ruled by an oligarchy that used strict military discipline to maintain control over a majority underclass. Attica, the city-state of which Athens was the leading city, was a democracy, though much more limited in the sense that women, slaves, and metics (resident aliens) were excluded from the rights of citizenship. The citizens of Attica in the fifth century probably numbered only 30,000, while the total population must have been ten times that. Slaves had no rights at all, and free-born women could not own property, hold office, or vote. Unlike Athens, Sparta was rigidly conservative in government and policy, had a superior land army, and eventually (after the Persian threat was eliminated) defeated Athens in 404 B.C.E. The image is a photograph of the Parthenon in Athens. Attribution: Onkel Tuca, 2007. The temple to Athena was built from 447–432 B.C.E. and replaced an earlier temple to Athena that had been destroyed during the Persian invasion.
- In the Histories, Herodotus studies non-Greek peoples in an attempt to understand their nomos (culture, law, custom). Persians are described as an honest people, and their legal system as more just and fair than that of the Greeks. Notice that the Greek word historia translates as “investigation”—in what ways do you think of history as a discipline of investigation and research? Herodotus attempts to discover the original conflict that triggers war between the Greeks and Asians; do you see this process of research and discovery as central to current work in this discipline? What do you think about Herodotus’ suggestion, that women (abducting them) are the driving force of war between nations—would this be a plausible reason to declare war in our time? Image is the dedication page for the Historiae, translated into Latin by Lorenzo Valla (1494). From the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript College, Yale University.
- Children’s education was based on the poems of Homer, and they were often instructed by educated slave tutors. By the fifth century B.C.E., intellectuals immigrating to Athens from other Greek cities met a new demand for their services as teachers—to train young men for public life, especially in the art of speaking. These tutors were known as Sophists (wisdom teachers), and taught rhetoric, government, ethics, and astronomy. Some fathers saw the advances as morally corrupting; Socrates, for example, used a question and answer method of teaching and emphasized goodness in a way that contradicted traditional beliefs and practices. The photograph is of a statue portrait of Socrates from the second century Roman copy of an Ancient Greek original of the fourth century BCE. Museo archeological regionale de Palermo, Italy.
- In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek city-states were involved in constant internecine warfare, and they fell under the power of King Philip of Macedon. Philip’s son, Alexander, inherited a powerful army and the political control of all of Greece, and used it to expand the Greek empire into Egypt and to the borders of India. After his death, Ptolemy founded a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt until after the Roman conquest. The Hellenistic cities grew out of the earlier city-state model and continued many of the civic and political institutions. At Alexandria, the Ptolemies founded a Greek library. The Middle East was Greek in the sense that it was a Greek-speaking region (the New Testament itself was written in koine, a simple vernacular Greek).
- When Alexander died in 323 B.C.E. the city of Rome was engaged in a struggle for the control of the surrounding areas. Rome dominated most of the Italian peninsula but came into collision with Carthage, the greatest power in the western Mediterranean and in North Africa. Three wars resulted before the Carthaginian general Hannibal was defeated in 201 B.C.E. Rome was not a democracy; rather, power was shared among several groups of people, which included a Senate, a body that controlled money and administration, Assemblies gathered from the people, and elected officials called Magistrates (Consuls) who were elected every year. Unlike the Athenians, the Romans saw conflict as deadly and based their civic virtue on tradition. The image is the painting Hannibal and His Men Crossing the Alps (1810–12), by J. W. M. Turner. Tate, Britain.
- Roman values included tradition (mos maiorum, the custom of predecessors), seriousness (gravitas), manly courage (virtus), industry (diligentia) and duty (pietas). Roman poets, however, often rejected the moral codes of their society. The poets Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid all chose themes or topics that raised questions about blind loyalty to the Roman state. Romans had conquered half the world before they began to write. Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey and generally relied on Greek models. The second and first centuries B.C.E. were dominated by civil war between various factions vying for power: generals against senators and populists against aristocrats. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.E. by a party hoping to restore the old system of shared rule. Octavian, Julius’s adopted nephew, restored the republic but assumed primary control of the state as the first in a long line of emperors that controlled an empire ranging from Britain to the Middle East and the whole of North Africa.
- This map depicts the sites of some of the world’s earliest civilizations. Ancient societies depended on agriculture for their survival, and thus, not surprisingly, we find them beginning in fertile areas such as the flood plains near the Nile river (in North Africa) and the Tigris and Euphrates (in ancient Mesopotamia). These early societies produced the first written documents in history, though writing was not first developed or used to produce literature. The earliest writing consisted mainly of informational and government records. But these ancient cultures did eventually turn the technology of writing toward literary ends. For example, the Sumerians, whose earliest writing involved the inscription of wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, produced The Epic of Gilgamesh (NAWOL, Volume A). This early literary work tells the tale of Gilgamesh and the founding of the city of Uruk (pictured on the map, along the Euphrates and near the Persian Gulf). The societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Phoenicia each played a key role in the invention and development of writing systems that would intermingle and evolve throughout history.
- The Persian Empire would, by the sixth century B.C.E., become the most powerful and the largest empire in the world. The empire was expressly expansionist, always looking to add new territory to its control, and with its well-trained and well-equipped army, was able to do so. This map depicts the extent of the Persian Empire, stretching from the western shores of Greece, through Asia Minor and east to the Indus river. The empire also included vast territories in Egypt (near the southern coast of the Mediterranean) and stretched from the northern coast of the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea north to the Black Sea. The inset shows two of the most important Persian campaigns: in 490 B.C.E., led by Darius, and in 480 B.C.E., led by Xerxes. Each of these brought the Persians into conflict with the Greeks (whose territory they wanted as their own). In famous battles like Thermopylae, the Greeks repelled the Persian invaders despite being vastly outnumbered.
- Following the Greek victory over the Persians in the fifth century B.C.E., the two Greek states of Sparta and Attica (of which Athens was the leading city) fell into war with one another. The Peloponnesian War, as it was called, pitted the Spartans and Athenians against each other along with their diverging world views. The Spartans were militaristic and oligarchic, whereas Athens represented one of the ancient world’s first proto-democracies. Despite having recently fought as allies against the Persians, these two Greek camps were at war with one another for nearly three decades. As this map depicts, territory was mixed, with Sparta maintaining control of mainland areas in the north and south, while the Athenians controlled most of the Greek islands (though Athens itself can be found on the Greek mainland. The Athenians were powerful at sea while the Spartan army ruled on land. The Peloponnesian War, with its decades of violent conflict, marked the end of Greek’s Golden Age. The war finally ended in 404 B.C.E. with the destruction of the Athenian army by Sparta.
- If the Persian Empire of the ancient world seemed impressive, it would prove no comparison to the Roman Empire, which emerged from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (which ended in 404 B.C.E.). Greece after that war never truly recovered, and its instability left it vulnerable to attack. The Macedonians invaded from the north, and the combined Macedonian and Greek armies, led by Alexander the Great, would invade Persia and eventually occupy vast territories in Egypt and India. Many Greek citizens fled the ruin in their own country to these new territories. When Alexander died in 323 B.C.E., the Roman Empire was engaged in a series of wars for control that centered around Rome itself and the Italian peninsula (as depicted on this map), and its expansion would grow into an empire with massive territory, including land in North Africa, modern Europe, and the Middle East. This map indicates main provincial capitals, which includes Rome, of course, but notice others spread across the map—Londinium (modern London), Alexandria (in Egypt), and Ancyra (or Ankara in modern Turkey). A territory of this size enabled cross-cultural exchange among many different societies. A good indication of how goods, people, and ideas were moving at this time is provided by the trade routes and major roads marked on the map, many extending beyond the borders of the empire itself.
- Answer: A Section: The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures Feedback: The earliest literature took the form of oral stories and songs. Of course, these only survived thanks to their having been eventually recorded in written form. Also, the term “oral literature” is somewhat contradictory in that the word “literature” is derived from Latin for “letters.”
- Answer: B Section: The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures Feedback: Writing first developed in Mesopotamia, largely as a means to record political, legal, and administrative information and not as a means to record stories or to create new imaginative works.
- Answer: C Section: The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures Feedback: Gilgamesh is known to us now because it was at some point recorded using the early cuneiform writing system. Cuneiform was executed using a wedge-shaped writing tool to make impressions into pliable clay tablets.
- Answer: C Section: Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Cultures Feedback: Most ancient cultures, such as those in Greece and Egypt, were polytheistic, which means that they believed in a pantheon of gods, not just one.
- Answer: D Section: The Greeks Feedback: Despite early Greek culture having developed an arts and crafts industry, not to mention a writing system (called Linear B), devastating fires sometime around 1200 B.C.E. plunged the Greeks into a Dark Ages and they lost their wealth, cultural traditions, industry, and their writing system. This Dark Ages period is sometimes referred to as the Homeric Age because it was at this time that oral literary traditions, that would produce Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, reemerged.
- Answer: B Section: The Greeks Feedback: At the time of Greece’s reemergence from its Dark Ages, the Persian Empire ruled a vast territory stretching from Asia Minor (eastern Greece/western Turkey on a modern map) all the way east into India. Despite its power, however, the Persian Empire was not able to capture areas of mainland Greece, like Athens or Sparta (which repelled Persian invasions from 490 to 479 B.C.E.). The “underdog” story of the Greeks repelling Persian invaders received modern Hollywood retelling in the 2006 film 300, in which King Leonidas defends Thermopylae with his army of “300.”